Skip to Navigation  Skip to Content  Skip to Footer Navigation  Skip to Sitemap Navigation Link 

The Walker Percy Project logo
The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer (William Rodney Allen, 1986)

Annotated by Daniel Vilmure

Allen, William Rodney. Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. xx, 160 pp.

Allen discusses all of Percy's novels with the exception of The Thanatos Syndrome. There are six chapters, the first concerning Percy's Southern heritage, the remaining five devoted to the novels.

Allen's Introduction states his aim "to trace the tragic, autobiographical theme [unifying] Percy's fiction" (xii) and to investigate how Percy the novelist attempted to transcend "an inordinate number of fathers" (xviii) — his biological (suicidal) father [LeRoy Pratt Percy]; his stoical, melancholy adopted father [William Alexander Percy]; his psychoanalytic father [Freud]; his cultural father [Faulkner]; and, finally, his American literary fathers [Twain, Warren, and Hemingway]. Allen's main critical threads come from Freud and Bloom: the former for psychoanalytic theory, the latter for "anxiety of influence."

Chapter One examines William Alexander Percy's oedipal feelings, asserts Percy's preference of Kierkegaard to psychoanalysis, and argues the ineffectuality of Percy's psychoanalytic treatment. In Chapter Two, Allen reads The Moviegoer for Binx's/Percy's discovery of "suicide" as the endpoint of quest, establishes Sam Yerger as a Hemingway model, and views Hemingway's suicide as reinforcing Percy's "conviction that stoic[ism] was inadequate" (37). Chapter Three explores The Last Gentleman's debt to Huckleberry Finn, and Percy's to psychoanalysis over existentialism; Allen gives a Freudian reading of Will's Central Park tryst with Kitty, and views Jamie's deathbed conversion as propelling the Percy hero toward "working through." The following chapter explores Love in the Ruins for parallels between More and Hemingway, More and Percy, and examines the Freudian "bad" father in light of Faust; Allen argues that the novel's two-dimensional heroines are distorted by More's "dream." The chapter on Lancelot deals with its Arthurian and Dantean elements and demonstrates its "perversion of inter subjectivity" (108); seeing the novel as anti-Lanterns on the Levee, Allen argues that it is "fueled by anger at father" (118) and considers homicide as a sin against communication. Finally, in Chapter Six, Allen treats The Second Coming as a resolution of the father-son problem, and Will's union with Allie as a victory of Eros over Thanatos, an attempt to reconcile Eros and Agape.

Allen relies on biographical and textual evidence to establish an oedipal framework for Percy's fiction, whereby the idea of "the father" becomes a way to discuss Percy's wayfaring. In this respect, Allen's achievement is as much psychoanalytic biography as psychoanalytic literary criticism.

A bibliography is not provided, but notes throughout suggest that Allen's scholarship is considerable.

The index is thorough and helpful.

Prepared as a requirement for Graduate Seminar
John R. May, Professor
Dept. of English
Louisiana State University
(Spring 1997)